Rhythm of 'The Visitor' beats true

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

April 25, 2008

(A) In movies such as George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, Tom McCarthy, as an actor, has the rare ability to inhabit a realistic scene as if he were recruited on location; he fades into an ensemble in a good way, lending it a cool, observant energy, emerging only to lend bite or shape to a scene.

As the writer-director of The Station Agent and now The Visitor, he has a similar talent as a moviemaker. He both uses real locations unself-consciously and discovers their pockets of poetry.

The Visitor is a small film; it's also an incandescent one. Richard Jenkins stars as Walter Vale, an economics professor at Connecticut College who hasn't recovered from the death of his wife. He agrees to deliver a paper he "co-authored" at NYU only because of the urging of his department chairman and his debt to the woman who really wrote it.

When he arrives at the Greenwich Village apartment he's kept but not used for decades, he discovers an immigrant couple - a Syrian named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), who plays African drum in a jazz group, and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira) - living there under the impression they're subletting.

The only surprise I'd give away, since it's such an integral part of the setup, is that for some reason they touch him and he lets them stay. From then on, The Visitor becomes a succession of stirring and heartbreaking epiphanies. It ends up encompassing America's treatment of illegal immigrants and turns into an unlikely yet utterly persuasive love story between Walter and Tarek's mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass).

The stroke of genius is that turnaround. As a writer-director, McCarthy, like the characters and the places that he suffuses with emotion, has poetry in him - and he knows how to let it out. He has a talent for demarcating those spaces in which characters can become whoever they want to be.

Walter Vale, who has resigned himself to life-in-death, marks the change of time by whiting out "2006" on his course syllabus and changing it to "2007." He goes through four piano teachers trying to learn the instrument on which his wife was a virtuoso, and the last one offers kindly to buy the piano. But he senses the potential that open-faced Tarek and the passionate, suspicious Zainab offer for his own life.

It's a show of McCarthy's humor and sensitivity that Walter doesn't welcome them right away: He sits down, has a drink, spies them struggling in the street, and calls them up. He's always hesitating to do what turns out to be the right thing - he's always going into the stairwell to call after Tarek and Zainab or, later Mouna; he'd have what the French call "staircase wit" if only he were witty.

The comedy and the heartbreak, too, play out in the pauses Jenkins takes between thought and action and even between sentences; he's a master of meanings that are hidden even to a character's own soul.

Jenkins is marvelous as a man who has let his life become all form, no content, and Sleiman matches him as a fellow who has gotten through life doing what he loves - playing the African drum, living with his beloved - and perhaps has too little fear of losing it.

Walter discovers that the beat of a different drum, Tarek's, is what he needs, and Tarek proves to be a good teacher. In one scene, they're separated by a pane of glass, but they pull off a duet. Walter pounds on a table, Tarek accompanies him on his chest, and the humor and the beauty of the moment are overwhelming - you realize that Tarek (and Walter) are making the music of the heart. Jenkins has wonderful moments with Gurira's Zainab, too - indeed they have a seriocomic tension precisely because she isn't as trusting as Tarek.

Abbass' Mouna has an old-fashioned womanliness to match the vestiges Jenkins' Walter still carries of an old-fashioned manliness. When he comes clean with her about the vacancy of his Connecticut life, his honesty doesn't repel her, it moves her.

There isn't a cliched or unfelt moment in The Visitor. Poet Robert Burns may have written that the greatest gift is to see ourselves as others see us. But McCarthy knows the greatest thing is to see yourself truly and whole, and to offer whatever is worthy to your loved ones and your friends.

>>>The Visitor (Overture) Starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira, Hiam Abbass. Directed by Thomas McCarthy. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language. Time 108 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com